Rufus Wainwright Wouldn't Mind If His Sister Taught His Young Daughter To Swear

Rufus Wainwright is chatting from somewhere so wonderfully cold that he has to stop shortly into our chat to get his car moved. “They’re going to tow it - snow - do you know snow there?” he asks cheekily. The well-travelled troubadour of course knows us here, having made many returns during his 20-year career and counting. The coming tour, All These Poses, is named after his second record, Poses, but celebrates it and his first self-titled work. 

“The further away I get from that period the more I am amazed with how possessed I was with purpose. I knew exactly what I wanted and I was willing to kill people to get it, and I put myself in very, very risky situations, and you know, would go back and forth between the different posts of interests,” he laughs “God, I was like a rabid animal! I wasn’t seeking money or fame necessarily, I was just seeking art, and I still think there’s a side of me that has continued that search, but at that young age I was just completely ravenous.”

Both Poses and the debut Rufus Wainwright reveal the vulnerabilities of being a young man – it's especially telling that this all happened around his 27th birthday – a time that we know can be particularly precarious for musicians. “Yeah, right around the Saturn Return,” he confirms. Did he feel a sense of being in danger at the time? “I was so fortunate in that I had a great mother who loved me dearly and was also a musician herself, so she knew the score, to be punny about it!,” he says, warmly referring to the late, wonderfully great Kate McGarrigle. “I think she could always tell that though I sought the darker side [of life and music] and really would do anything to move the ball a bit, I was not a nihilist, you know. I was not there to extinguish my fire, but I was more there for a silver lining. And I think she saw that and she very much had my back in those times… It’s funny, two days ago was the ninth anniversary of her death, so we’re coming up on the tenth next year, so it’s all starting to round out,” Wainwright continues.

“The further away I get from that period the more I am amazed with how possessed I was with purpose."

McGarrigle’s influence was behind the scenes but also front and centre in songs like Beauty Mark, too. “I sing a lot of her songs. And I mean, both my sister [singer-songwriter] Martha [Wainwright] and I are so just so blessed to be able to be in contact with our mother through her music. And actually, you know, get to interpret that work and therefore inhabit her true self. So that’s an amazing gift that we have. And I do feel at the moment, especially having a child now of my own, I’m now prepared to coast a while and just be a dad and focus on the living. I have heard from a few people that your mother comes back to you near the end (laughs), so I’m sure I’ll see her again, I know that.”

Wainwright’s description of knowing someone by ‘singing their songs’ is there in his early recordings. In addition to referring to his family in his original works, he also covered a song by his singer-songwriter father, Loudon Wainwright, One Man Guy for Poses. Would Rufus like to hear his daughter play any of his work – or better, have her avoid any of it!?

“Well, you know, she loves Montauk [from 2012’s Out Of The Game], which was about her, it addresses her, but it’s really up to her. I would never dream of forcing any songs on her,” he says. Wainwright’s daughter, who he parents with her mother Lorca Cohen [Leonard Cohen’s daughter] will be a particularly special little (musical) soul to nurture. “I have to be careful of that because there’s so many great songs, my songs, there’s Leonard’s songs, there’s my mother’s songs and my father’s songs, so needless to say she has a vast quantity to choose from.”

Is Wainwright worried that his little girl might pick up Aunty Martha Wainwright’s work too, maybe her single Bloody Mother Fucking Arsehole? “No, I would be overjoyed!” he exclaims.